Pirate Rain by Jennifer Maiden (review)

Politics is a common theme in Jennifer Maiden's work and she doesn't restrict herself to commenting just on the Australian sphere.

Madeleine Albright and former Ambassador to the UN, Richard Butler have made appearances in her poetry. In her latest collection Pirate Rain political celebrities like Barack Obama and Sarah Palin make cameos.

Jennifer Maiden has won many prizes for her writing including the Christopher Brennan Award for a lifetime of achievement in poetry.

Transcript

Geoff Page: That poem, 'The Meat Vote', is fairly typical of Jennifer Maiden's new collection, Pirate Rain. It employs trans-historical conventions; it's passionate in its convictions and yet, at the same time, deeply ironic. Maiden's own political views seem to be to the left of almost everyone and yet she is no apologist for the governments that most leftists approve of.

Like many of her other poems, 'The Meat Vote' takes for granted a familiarity with contemporary media and popular culture. We are meant to remember who Lindy England is, for instance, even if we're not quite ready to make the implied ethical jump from the grinning Abu Ghraib torturer to the moose-shooting governor of Alaska. Maiden always has a witty turn of phrase which stops her poems being seen as mere propaganda by those who disagree with her. Vegans, in particular, will appreciate her describing a moose felled by Sara Palin, as having 'the look / of most dying and dead / herbivores: polite, / puzzled, as is still trying to be / helpful.' Later in the poem she cleverly refers to the Republicans' expectation that presidential candidate, Obama, will be similarly 'puzzled, polite and helpful'. Alas, they are neatly wrong-footed when Obama instead 'stroke(s) a nice live cow in Chicago meatworks / to get the right wing vote.'

This is the sort of subtlety we get in quite a number of poems in Pirate Rain. There is no doubt, of course, that Maiden prefers Obama to George W Bush (who's invariably despised). She remains unillusioned, however, about his rather more charismatic replacement. Similar ironies are seen in her now long-running, sequence on George Jeffreys and his girlfriend, Clare -- which began in Maiden's previous book, Friendly Fire, and continues over a further nine episodes in this new collection.

A similar sequence, featuring Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton, covers comparable territory, with perhaps a more feminist emphasis. Some readers might see such 'time-travelling' as merely a variant on Doctor Who but Maiden is much more serious than that. In the Clinton/Roosevelt poems Maiden is interested particularly in the compromises that liberal, intelligent women (such as these two 'first ladies') have to make to get their agendas implemented. Having to put up with philandering husbands is but a small part of it.

Pirate Rain also contains its fair share of 'one-off' poems, some of which (such as 'My Only Adelaide', 'My Forester' and 'Shortlist') have a decidedly autobiographical flavour. As in earlier collections, there are several poems addressed to, or alluding to, Maiden's daughter, Katherine -- to whom the book is dedicated. One of these, 'Diary Poem: Uses of Anger', starts off with the complaint: 'When a critic attacked my work, said that / my poems were just diary entries, / it took some backbone not to step back / from first person persona, or to retort / snarling as he wanted style and structure.'

Such exposure of her own vulnerabilities is just one of the several risks that Maiden typically takes in her poetry. Another is the discursive mode which some readers might tire of, were it not enlivened frequently with the turns of wit already referred to. A third is the assumption that television and popular culture will be as important to most of her audience as they are to her. In this Maiden is probably correct. By the end of Pirate Rain, however, most readers will consider such risks to have been well worth the taking -- and be happy to have spent the time necessary with such a distinctive, if somewhat fierce, personality.